For some years Labour Affairs has pointed to the increasing authoritarian tendencies of our political parties in parliament, noting the lack of substantive policy differences between them and their complicity in introducing legislation that erodes citizen’s rights, most notably the Terrorism Act of 2000, an act breathtaking in its scope, with no temporal limitation and, currently, the enthusiastic enforcement of its most controversial clause bearing on the ability to protest. The general attitude of successive governments over the last 30 years gives little reason to suppose that the political parties have civil liberties at the top of their agendas. 

This legislation, although repressive, does not yet enable governments to minutely control the life of citizens. A necessary instrument for doing that is an identity (ID) document, that registers your right to go about your business as a private citizen. At the moment, no such document is needed, the default position is that you can go about your business, draw and deposit money at a bank, apply for and gain employment, draw a pension, gain access to health care etc. without the need for such a document. You may well need a national insurance number to legally gain employment, an NHS number to access the health service and, say proof of address and income to open a bank account, but these are all separate pieces of information created for a specific purpose.

A mandatory ID document would oblige a citizen to present it in order to show that he or she were going about their lawful business and could be used to gain access to one or more of the following services that we are all going to need at some point in our lives.

Legal services, Employment, renting or buying a home, banking, social security including child benefit, access to the NHS, pensions, insurance, right to drive a vehicle, travel outside the UK.

Starmer’s original proposal was for mandatory digital ID. Liberals and Tories are opposed to this and the government has retreated. At the moment, the government is saying that such a document will not be mandatory but that it will be required to establish an individual’s right to work. In addition, it is claimed, it will make it easier for UK citizens to access the services listed above. It’s important to note that neither Liberals nor Tories are opposed to voluntary digital ID.

The government acknowledges that there is an extensive black economy that exerts a powerful attraction to economic migrants and employers who want labour on the cheap. Such employers, however, are not going to be deterred by a ‘requirement’ that a prospective employee shows them a digital ID. They are already engaged in an illegal practice by not requiring a national insurance document. The whole point of the black economy is that it operates below the radar of official scrutiny and adding another legal requirement will not do anything to change that. Incidentally, the black economy employs more UK citizens than illegal immigrants and has been around for decades. You have to ask the question ‘why isn’t the government doing more to suppress it and improve working conditions across the country?’ 

The answer is that successive governments have been against regulation and in some cases take steps to ensure that existing regulations are not enforced or that the enforcement agencies do not have the resources to do their job properly. This government is no different. If it wanted to suppress or reduce the black economy it could increase scrutiny and inspections and make it very risky for employers to employ staff without insurance or residence permits. The digital ID proposal is a spurious reason for doing something that the government wants to do anyway, while ignoring something that it is not particularly interested in doing anything about.

But surely voluntary digital ID is not a threat to civil liberties? Starmer and his influencers know that mandatory digital ID will be regarded with deep suspicion by the majority of citizens. This is not surprising as all the services listed above could become conditional on presenting a digital ID. Making it voluntary is, therefore, a sensible first step on the road to introducing mandatory digital ID. A few years on and the government will come back with a proposal to ‘consolidate the success’ of voluntary digital ID by making it mandatory. At that point, the basic resources that a citizen needs to access vital services are dependent on the wish of the government. Withdrawal of one’s digital ID could be introduced either as a formal sanction or as ‘glitch’ that could be introduced into the ID of someone who the government did not approve of, such as a political dissident. An individual thus sanctioned could be denied access to legal services, social security, banking, health services, a passport, insurance, a driving licence and would thus be rendered helpless. How convenient for a government of control freaks.

Control over the lives of citizens in a form that no other state has yet been able to achieve would result from such a measure. Dissent and nonconformity could be dealt with at the click of a mouse. Britons ought to oppose this first step towards totalitarian control with all means at their disposal. 3 million have already signed a petition opposing the measure for mandatory digital ID. Labour Affairs is saying that we should oppose voluntary digital ID as a first step towards the mandatory system that will most likely appear in several years time. The government has indicated that it ultimately wants to introduce mandatory digital ID. It has ‘tipped its hand’ as to its true long-term intentions.

In conclusion we should mention two other issues. The first is security, vital personal data can easily be hacked by third parties. The second is the question of who runs such a system. If given to an American company then the data will be vulnerable to a request from the Federal Government to access it, providing further danger to our civil liberties. 

We live in a country where civil liberties and the ability to dissent from the narrow consensus that the three main political parties have built up is increasingly under threat. This is the context in which the proposed introduction of digital ID should be seen.